Dell & WPP Building A New Kind Of Agency

Dell officially notified us today that we won their total business! More specific, WPP won the opportunity to join Dell to create a new global integrated marketing and communications agency (this is CMO Mark Jarvis’ blog post… also note Casey Jones’ video at the end). The story is in the WSJ, Ad Age, the wires, etc.

This is exciting news indeed and it caps off a 7-month ride on an intellectually stimulating and emotional roller coaster for me and my WPP colleagues. Now it’s time to get on with the hard part:)!

Dell’s leadership has not wavered one iota from their bold (and slightly frightening) vision to build a new and totally integrated agency, with one P&L, focused on building Dell’s brand and generating shareholder value. The vision is great, and I believe WPP with its breadth and depth of global resources is really the only partner that can execute it well. You should take that with a grain of salt since I work for a WPP company, and I am a shareholder. But I can tell you that through this pitch process I learned a tremendous amount about WPP’s companies and people — especially its digital assets and experts which seem to grow weekly — and I am impressed with the shear digital power in this firm.

The new Dell WPP agency has the opportunity to work with Dell to build a super-optimized digital ecosystem around dell.com, commercial sales and its rapidly growing retail channel. Think about it: Digital strategy and analytics, interactive, digital content creation, social media, SEM, SEO, online advertising, mobile marketing & services, etc., under one roof and motivated to work together to optimize the customer experience. The ability to execute this at Dell’s scale really doesn’t exist in one agency today.

I’ve been to the “integration movie” before, as they say. I was on the Y&R, Inc., team (Y&R Advertising, Landor, Burson-Masteller, Wunderman, etc.) that originally won the Accenture business in the late 1980’s with an integrated offer. My boss at the time, Jim Murphy, lead the charge and we managed 4-5 integrated agency teams that were still highly independent from a P&L standpoint. Integration was really hard work and required a lot of heated debates to agree on brand positioning, brand name, campaigns, creative, etc. For instance, Jim and Peter Georgescu were still debating the new name for the consulting business 10 minutes prior to the presentation in which we were recommending it! They probably don’t even remember the debate, but they turned to me and said “rework the slides…” which was a non-trivial task and it almost gave me a heart attack at a tender age. In the end, all the blood, sweat and tears to achieve integration was very worthwhile from a results standpoint — the firm grew rapidly and Accenture is one of the best known brands in business today. We — the Accenture and Y&R, Inc., teams — also had a tremendous amount of fun working together and innovating new approaches to achieve common goals.

Congratulations to everyone who contributed to the Dell WPP agency win. Let the innovation and fun begin.

2 December 2007 | Dell | Comments